The House of Worms

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The House of Worms Page 11

by Harvey Click


  “Beware the inferno kindled by a bitter ember,” she had said.

  Two fires burned in his memory, and he pulled over to the side of the road. He’d seen Bitter Ember’s face in his rear-view mirror long enough. Time to end this nagging little annoyance so he could enjoy his retirement.

  He’d seen a tracking stone at the safe-house, but she probably didn’t have anything to scent it with his smell. Or maybe she did: he was scratching the scar under his dead eye when he noticed that the finger Linda Hall had bruised was missing a nail. Nothing could scent a stone better than a nice dirty nail. Now that he put his mind to it, he believed he could feel her somewhere back there behind him, somewhere back there moving closer.

  He grinned and started his truck. It wasn’t easy to track in hilly country, so he drove nice and slow. Let her feel like the hunter.

  ***

  One of the Jeep’s headlights died twenty miles out of Kingston, and it was hard to make out the twisty road. Bitter was tired and hungry and had to stop every few minutes to read the tracking stone, but it kept pulling her on. There was no time for remorse, and it was too late to undo her mistakes, but maybe it wasn’t too late for revenge.

  A sharp curve caught her half-asleep, and she skidded off the road. She rubbed her eyes and saw dead faces in the retinal spots, and Naomi’s face still reminded her of Dexter’s. The brass pyramid had fallen to the floor. She put it back in the passenger seat, and when the stone stopped rocking it pulled in the wrong direction.

  Ryver was somewhere behind her.

  She turned the Jeep around and drove slowly, stopping every quarter mile to read the stone until it pointed down a dirt lane leading into a narrow ravine. There was a rusty chain-link gate with a sign across it.

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  KEEP OUT

  She found a grove of trees a little way up the road and hid the Jeep. Her clothing was black, black leather jacket, black flannel shirt, black jeans, black boots, and she blacked her face with charcoal. She hung her night-vision monocular around her neck, slung the SKS over her shoulder, shoved the S&W in her jeans, and grabbed the tracking stone.

  Thin clouds were drifting past the moon, making its vague light shifty and deceitful. She switched on her monocular and peered through the chain-link gate. A narrow weedy lane wended between two steep ridges and vanished around a bend after thirty feet or so. Some of the weeds appeared to be mashed down as if a vehicle had driven over them recently. Ryver could be watching her from above or waiting for her at the end of the lane.

  Her eye pulsed with green light when she switched off the monocular. There were a few footholds in the ridge to the left of the gate, but it was steep and the dirt was loose. She had only one usable hand because the brass pyramid was in the other, but she pressed her body against jagged rocks like a second hand, and her pistol dug cold in her gut.

  She reached the top and ran to a clump of blackberry bushes. She saw a doe and its fawn but nothing shaped like a man. She darted silently from boulder to brush to tree trunk, following the ridge top until it sloped steeply down into a pine woods. The tracking stone pointed at a little log cabin nestled down there in the trees. Behind it was a pickup truck with a camper shell.

  She switched on her monocular. The cabin door hung open, and she thought she saw someone sitting inside in the dark but wasn’t sure.

  She scurried halfway down the moss-slick slope and hid behind a boulder. Another look through the night-viewer showed a man with a cowboy hat sitting in a chair with his back to the cabin door. She aimed her rifle at his head and flicked off the safety but didn’t shoot.

  There was something wrong with this picture, man sitting motionless and a tall pine with its top bent low like a goose neck above the cabin.

  She left her stone and SKS behind the boulder because they slowed her down, and the rifle bullets were nothing but lead anyway. The S&W would be better for close work, and its bullets were made of Hermesium. She slid the rest of the way down the slope.

  ***

  Ryver sat in a tree and shivered. The night air was sharp, and his coat and hat were in the cabin dressing up a scarecrow. The scarecrow was stuffed with dirty laundry ripe with his smell, and the clothes he was wearing were sprayed with lavender-scented air freshener, best way he knew of to trick a tracking stone.

  A hard knot of bark was numbing his hip and making his toes ache like bad teeth. He’d chosen this tree because it had dense leaves to hide him, while most of the others had needles. The cabin partially blocked his view of the ridge, but he didn’t need a good view to know she was near. He could feel her in the little hairs tingling on the back of his neck, and if he shut his good eye he could almost see her with the dead one. He sat and waited.

  He wondered how many times he’d been hiding up in a tree or down in a damp cave, all those years of hunting and being hunted, Christsake it’s been a damn long time. He wondered what it would be like once the hunting was over, and he remembered a time back when John Kennedy was shot and Cypher disappeared for a while, and he remembered how empty those days had been with nothing to do but sit and drink and wait for the Man to reappear with new orders, someone new to kill. But retirement wouldn’t be like that. He had made out a list of things he wanted to do, books he wanted to read and places he wanted to go. Most of all he wanted to enjoy the pieces of property he owned, build some new cabins, relax, grow some tomatoes and hot peppers, fish and hunt, hunt for food instead of men. It was going to be sweet.

  A sudden whoosh and a loud cry. The goose-neck pine beside the cabin swayed up tall and straight again. Ryver could see her way up there at the top, little skinny scrap all dressed in black caught like a toasted marshmallow on the upper branches carved to sharp spikes. Two spikes stuck out the back of her jacket, her legs were impaled by two more, and her arms jerked with death spasms.

  Okay, Pocahontas, enjoy your last dance. Ryver climbed down, shook his stiff right leg to wake it up, and walked over to the tree trap to look up at his work.

  So much for the prophecy of an old hechicera, he thought. Then he felt the little hairs tingling again on the back of his neck.

  ***

  Bitter peered around the corner of the cabin, sighting her S&W and trying to keep her hands from shaking so she could hit the son of a bitch staring up at the tree trap twenty yards away. She was shivering all over because she was wearing nothing but boots and a tee-shirt and a pair of panties. The rest of her clothes were up in the tree—she had stuffed them with branches and leaves to fashion a dummy and had tossed it into Ryver’s snare. She steadied her arm against the cabin and squeezed the trigger.

  The hammer fell with a sharp click on a dud. Grimes had loaded the cartridges with Hermesium bullets, and the old bastard’s tricks never worked when you needed them.

  The noise of the hammer made Ryver hit the ground and roll behind some bushes. Bitter chambered a new cartridge, and this one worked good and loud. The bushes squirmed, and then there was silence, but she didn’t trust it.

  She hid behind the corner of the cabin and listened and heard a quick rustle back where the truck was parked. She aimed her pistol at a skinny shadow sneaking toward it, but something wrapped around her wrist and shocked the gun out of her hand.

  It was Ryver’s animate wire. He was so close behind her, she should have felt his breath on her neck. He jerked the wire and yanked her off her feet.

  “Your crotch is showing, Pocahontas,” he said. “Don’t worry, I seen worse things in my time.”

  He reached for his revolver, but before he got it out of his belt Bitter’s wire bracelet uncoiled itself and whipped through the air like a rattlesnake, one end wrapping around her left hand and the other end wrapping around his throat. He grunted with surprise, and his own wire lost its grip on her wrist.

  She felt it bleeding as she scrambled to her feet and slipped the knife out of her boot. She was trying to make her wire slice his throat, but he was holding it and taming its fury with his will-power. It
let go of his neck and sagged limply to the ground while his own shot up from the grass and cut the side of her face.

  She ducked and caught his wire with hers. Two streaks of silver wrapped around each other, snapping and hissing in the dark air. Ryver got out his knife, and they faced off and grappled in a shrinking circle. They kept tugging their animate wires and pulling within knife-reach to lunge, and then they would tumble backwards and claw at the stony dirt to regain their footing.

  She felt a sudden pain in her right breast and saw blood on her cut tee-shirt and more blood on the tip of his knife. He grinned, and his blade slashed her tee-shirt again. Now her belly was bleeding.

  It was his face that was winning this fight, that dead eye, don’t look at it. She lunged and tried to stab the other eye, but his boot caught her ribs and sent her sprawling backwards. She hit the dirt hard and instinctively rolled even before she saw Ryver’s knife flashing toward her, but the blade nicked her thigh anyway.

  The sharp pain shocked her wire loose from his. She saw his grin coming closer and flung her knife at it, but his face flitted away like a shadow. In fact he was standing six feet away from whatever she had seen, still grinning and reaching for his gun. Old optriloquist trick, throwing your image for suckers to see like the way ventriloquists throw their voices, and Grimes had warned her about it many times.

  She pitched a handful of dry dirt in his good eye and made the grin disappear. He looked blind and easy to kill, but he had a gun and she didn’t. She jumped up and ran in a zigzag so he couldn’t get a good aim, her head pounding and her wire whirling through the air and wrapping itself around her wrist like a bracelet again.

  A bullet shrieked past her ear, and the next one bit bark off a tree trunk as she ducked behind it.

  She ran to another tree and kept running until she found a fat one. She crouched behind it panting and examined the ridge where she’d come down, looking for something solid to protect her from bullets, but there wasn’t much. Better go farther into the woods.

  She heard his boots crunching through the pine needles, and she sprinted to another tree. She waited and listened. Cold breeze stroked her sweaty body with damp fingers, and the warmth she felt on her shirt front was wet blood. She heard him stalking toward her through the brush, taking his time.

  When his boots stopped, she peeked out. He was close enough to touch if you had a long arm and a strong stomach, looking almost at her but not quite, head cocked to the side listening to something she couldn’t hear. He whirled and fired twice, and a wounded deer fell out of a thicket fifty yards away.

  Before the gunshots faded, Bitter was running deeper into the thick woods. Berry thorns shredded her skin and branches clawed her face. She tripped over a weed-wrapped rock and ripped her knee on broken glass or a sharp stone. The trees grew so dense she could scarcely see, but she heard his boot heels crunching behind her.

  When she stopped hearing them she hid and listened, but her ragged breath drowned everything else. She switched on the monocular and saw him struggling uncertainly through the brush far away and getting farther. She watched until she was sure he had lost her trail, and then she aimed the monocular at the ridge. There was a crevice that might give her a little cover.

  She crept through trees to the clearing and then ran to the crevice and started clawing her way up. It was just an erosion gully no deeper than a ditch, no cover at all. The dirt was steep and loose, and she slid down faster than she went up. She was making a lot of noise, and pretty soon she heard Ryver thrashing through the woods below.

  She was about halfway up when a bullet hit rock inches from her face, and dirt exploded in her eyes. She clambered onto a narrow ledge and tried to blink her vision clear. Between blinks she saw him standing in the clearing below reloading his revolver. She found a rock the size of a softball and hurled it, calling on the spirits of the forest to guide it straight and hard.

  It caught him on the shoulder, and she scurried along the ledge throwing every rock she found until she saw him racing to the woods under a barrage of stones.

  “I got all night, Pocahontas, and I got plenty of ammo,” Ryver yelled. “I got more traps up there, and they kill real slow and don’t feel good. Come on down here, and we’ll talk this over nice and peaceful like old friends.”

  She scrambled higher where there were some saplings to grab, and the steepness started to level off. When she reached the top, she stumbled from tree to tree looking for the big rock where her rifle was hidden, but there were many big rocks.

  She was cold and sick to her stomach. She wiped clammy sweat off her thighs and saw that it was blood. She remembered the big rock was part-way down the ridge, and that wasn’t where she wanted to be, but she kept stumbling along the edge and looking down because some things get started before you’re born and you better finish them before you’re dead. Cold wind swept up from the valley stirring the trees, and she imagined she heard her father’s dead voice in the dying leaves:

  “Always remember, Bitter Ember.”

  A bullet bit the ground beside her, and she ducked and lost her balance and started sliding down the slope. Gunpowder cracked again as she slid into something hard that stopped her fall.

  When she saw what it was, she believed the forest-spirits had heard her prayer. It was a rock big enough to hide behind, and her rifle was lying there beside it. She picked up the SKS and kissed it.

  She switched on her monocular and saw Ryver standing beside the cabin with a lever rifle. He had his hat and coat on and was pulling the collar tight around his neck—poor bastard must be chilly. Okay, motherfucker, I’ll warm you up with some nice hot lead.

  She sighted, but he slipped behind the corner of the cabin just as she squeezed the trigger. Minutes passed, then she saw the barrel of his rifle poking around from the back of his truck. She shot, and he darted behind a tree, and she shot again and saw him running through the woods, and she kept shooting till the gun was empty. Her ears were so numb with gunfire that she didn’t hear the roar of his truck until she saw the gray plume of exhaust charging down the lane.

  Old optriloquist trick, throw your image into the trees for suckers to shoot. Her energy fled with Ryver, and she noticed how torn up she was, one thigh slit deep and the knee gouged open, arms skinned raw, swollen cut wrist scabbing shut, slashed belly still bleeding badly, one nipple sliced into two seeping halves, and she was colder than she’d ever been. She needed a doctor.

  Her car keys were down there near the cabin where she’d taken her clothes off. She stumbled and slid down the slick mossy slope with her rifle in one hand and her tracking stone in the other, and the new bruises didn’t hurt because she was too cold to feel them. She examined the trap-tree but couldn’t see any way to retrieve her clothes.

  Clothes didn’t seem to matter anymore, or cuts or Dexter or anything else, only thing that mattered was how long this Goddamn lane stretched out, bitter wind sweeping down the ravine past icicle bones, shivering stars bleeding in a clear frozen sky.

  She was dreaming of a black snake sliding through green grass in a pink apple orchard when she reached the end of the lane. The chain-link gate was unlocked, son of a bitch must have been in a hurry.

  She dreamed some more as she walked to the Jeep, long road stretching out like a snake sliding through old time before she was born. Nothing here but dreams and cold, and when dreams die there’s nothing left but cold.

  She opened the back of the Jeep and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater, but they felt cold too. It occurred to her that maybe Ryver had booby-trapped the vehicle—turn the key and blow sky-high.

  She got in and fired up the Jeep and was disappointed when it didn’t explode.

  Part Two: The Lost Ones

  Chapter Eleven

  Do it now while Grimes’ influence was weak, Johnny Burne told himself. He’d been feeling it weaken minute by minute ever since Dexter Radcliff showed up last night. The old fuck was busy working his routine on a new sucker and apparen
tly didn’t have enough snake oil left over to keep the house boy under his thumb. Just went to prove what Burne always suspected: the almighty master wasn’t half as almighty as he let on.

  Unless he was just feigning weakness. Burne tried not to think about that possibility as he fished his Hermesium amulet out of its hiding place in his bedroom closet. He had found Grimes’ Hermesium stash a few weeks ago when he spied him down in the basement casting special bullets for that Indian gash to use in some job that was none of the house boy’s business because nothing was anymore. The next day he swiped a chunk of it and carved his own power sign on it and attached it to a necklace, and now with the help of the amulet he intended to show the boss man who the real boss was. He reached through the window bars and threw it into the weeds beside the garage.

  His hands were shaking so badly that he had to sit on the bed for a few minutes. He pictured himself in a pretty little rowboat on a pretty little pond until the mad drumming in his ears calmed to a nice steady pulse. Meditation was about the only useful trick the old fuck had ever taught him, but personally he’d prefer a couple good hits of opiated hash.

  Okay, do it now or do it never. He went downstairs and pounded on the library door. When Grimes opened it, Burne’s pretty little rowboat capsized in a surge of jealousy. He had lived in this house for three frigging years and still wasn’t allowed in the sanctum sanctorum, but there stood that prick Radcliff sweating in his tee-shirt like he owned the Goddamn place. He was learning fencing secrets from the master.

  “Looks like you got yourself a new apprentice,” Burne said.

  Grimes lifted his fencing mask and wiped his face with a handkerchief. “It’s none of your business,” he said.

  “Nothing ever is except waiting on you hand and foot,” Burne said. “Right now I gotta go buy your damn groceries.”

 

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